ISG Harnesses the Potential of Technology Business Management

For an event only in its second year, the recent Technology Business Management (TBM) Conference in Miami was eagerly anticipated by a Who’s Who of the C-Suite. Almost half of the more than 700 attendees were CFOs, CIOs or Senior Finance VPs from major, blue-chip companies who came for the express purpose of discussing the potential of TBM, an emerging discipline for managing the business of IT and extracting maximum value from IT investments.

Here’s what we knew going into the conference:

Like other corporate business functions, IT must manage and report on the cost and performance of its products and services, especially as it increasingly is seen as an enabler of growth. The role of IT as a strategic component in planning is clear. Companies are moving more and more of their workloads to the cloud. CIOs are pushing to digitize and automate and collect data at every point, to drive everything from product development to customer engagement. To create real innovation and growth, a company must continually reassess its use of technology, scrutinize its balance sheets and shift its IT spend to new, more productive technologies.

Here’s what we learned at the conference:

Apptio’s suite of SaaS-based TBM applications delivers transparency by calculating the true cost of IT. The TBM taxonomy reveals precisely where IT connects to the business, enabling a complete understanding of IT spend – per application, per business unit, per device – measuring cost all up and down the IT supply chain.

The even-better news, for us and our clients, is:

Apptio’s taxonomy is ISG’s taxonomy. As Apptio’s go-to partner for data and benchmarking services, ISG will meet clients wherever they are along their TBM journey to help them accomplish their IT investment goals. If a company can truly capture what their storage spend is, for instance, ISG can measure it against industry standard. If it’s three times higher than industry spend, ISG will work with the client to explore why.

ISG will implement Apptio software and then take clients to the next step, helping them to answer the “so what?” By collecting, configuring and visualizing data in Apptio, ISG can provide deep insights on IT optimization areas, including comparison of revenue and investments in applications, portfolio rationalization, server consolidation, and consumption management. ISG also can improve communication with the business, helping to develop a service catalog and implement demand-and-consumption management techniques.

By leveraging the discipline of TBM, ISG will be able to help companies create a bill of IT and shift the conversation from how to control IT costs to how to use IT to better manage and grow the business. With our world-class data and benchmarking capabilities, no one else in the market will be able to offer the insights and the view that we can.

In the end, the trip to Miami was well worth it – for Apptio, for ISG, and for the C-Suite executives hoping to use technology to transform their operations and take their businesses to the next level.

About the author

As a partner and member of the Executive Board, Mr. Hall leads ISG’s Digital Strategy and all ISG Service Lines for the Americas. He also leads ISG’s Alliance group and is ISG’s Executive Sponsor to the TBM Council. During his time with ISG, Mr. Hall has led some of the company’s largest and most complex engagements with clients as diverse as United Airlines, Symantec, BP, World Bank, CEMEX and Motorola. He is a seasoned professional who brings considerable experience in emerging technologies to ISG clients. Prior to his position at ISG, Mr. Hall held senior roles at a number of renowned IT services companies, including Unisys and MCI. He also led large-scale eBusiness initiatives for technology solutions providers C-Bridge and CBSI and gained deep outsourcing and offshore software development experience as a delivery executive with Covansys. Mr. Hall co-authored Managing Global Development Risk: A Guide to Managing Global Software Development. He earned his degree in Computer Science from Regis University.